Wall of Doom

Existing wall kiosk within the Yale School of Art hacked to play Id Software’s 1993 classic “Doom” video game.

Stewdio targeted an existing information kiosk at the Yale School of Art for a design intervention that replaced the sanctioned content with something more suited to the kiosk’s arcade-style trackball and fire-button interface. Paralleling an assertion that function follows form, this intervention allowed content to follow a physical interface.

The kiosk consisted of an inset screen and mousing platform with no keyboard and no physical access to the actual computer. The hack required using only a trackball and single-button to exit the kiosk’s fullscreen mode then download and install Doom Legacy. (Configuring the game’s control bindings was another issue.)

The results were amusing. Students and office staff were often discovered taking stress breaks to shoot down zombie marines and demons at the gates of Hell. No hardware or software components were vandalized. The kiosk returned to normal operation sometime later.